Share this:

Evolve is the next game from original Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock, and that alone should be enough to turn an eye or two or however many you happen to have. I was a giant firebreathing space mutant recently, so I can’t judge. I got to go hands-on with Evolve’s second batch of Hunters and gameplay options, and I came away with opinions. Powerful ones, beastly thoughts that couldn’t be caged by mere words alone. So I made this video for you instead. Watch it below.

41 Comments

Animations of the monster are amazingly… poor and disappointing. Look like from a low-budget production, not something that aspires to be AAA title. At least for this large, two-legged monster. (small monsters seem to be much better)

I wan’t to be excited about this but I am not … what I loved about either Left4Dead was that sense of vulnerability and hopelessness, scrabbling together weapons, ammunition and the odd med-kit but this seems to be too much of a boring boss fight without meaningful decisions just pressing buttons and hoping for the best, because the medic is right behind you, ready to piece your bits together after being beaten to a pulp by a 10 foot monster. I don’t get any sense of danger from any of those videos, I am sad to say.

Tank battles against humans who know what they’re doing are, however, deliciously tense affairs, especially in Realism mode where you have to maintain your situational awareness at all times (because the game is no longer doing it for you). That seems to be the dynamic they’re going for here, and I’m pretty sold by this point.

Against a good human opponent in VS mode it can get all kinds of tense, most players suck because actually being able to practice with tank is so rare, but I’ve met a few amazing tanks who can rape an entire team with methodical precision, and the team was rather good. Even a competent tank will kill one or two guys…

It’s clear they are targeting a completely different group of people than l4d players which is understandable since they’re a small studio, I doubt they could touch Valve. However I just can’t figure out who they’re trying to get, I don’t quite see any group this game appeals to. On top of that it doesn’t look too good in general, but that’s mainly because I don’t see it having any replay value at all… Maybe they’ll surprise me though.

This looks like a lot of fun but I’m still concerned about the balance, a lot of what I’ve seen so far looks like the hunters have huge advantages over the monster. For example: their manoeuvrability, decent health (one vid had a hunter caught by himself for a little while and the monster couldn’t kill him before the others arrived), easy tracking (blue footprints seem to allow chasing at full speed), abilities the monster has no counter to, and being able to set up for the end of the game.
I can’t help feeling that could well spoil the game, I know the monster’s meant to be weaker at the start but it just seems too skewed at the moment, it sounds like the monster’s on the back foot for the whole match and that just doesn’t appeal.

Also, as Nathan says, replayability. A randomised monster for each map and a randomised end goal for the map (maybe even that the hunters don’t know?) could go a long way to stopping things getting routine.

I’d be interested in seeing how people play this game if they’re already familiar with team based/monster based games.
At this time I can only think of Natural Selection (2)/LFD players as having experience in general monstering (knowing when to chip players, when to pick off, when to bugger off.). Which is exciting since they’re my core gamer crowd right now.

I’m getting a bit worried that every report from this Preview Event thing mentions about final-form monster gameplay turning into the team of humans turning the reactor room into a killing box and then the monster loses. Presumably it’s not beyond the abilities of Turtle Rock to rejig either level design or win parameters to fix this (multiple reactor rooms, like the paired bomb sites in Counterstrike seem the most obvious solution), but I don’t want to buy a multiplayer-only game where rote strategies are found so quickly.

I don’t like the 1v4 setup in Evolve. Left 4 Dead’s multiplayer was amazing because the infected team required coordination in order to actually get a kill. Evolve looks like they just scrapped the strategy element and gave the monster an absurd hit point pool, which is frustrating for both teams.